ASUS ROG Strix Z270I Gaming Review

With the ROG Strix Z270I Gaming, ASUS has a well equipped mini-ITX motherboard in its portfolio, which comes with a bunch of interesting features. There are for example two M.2 Gen 3 x4 slots and an internal USB 3.1 connector. Apart from that ASUS refined the design of their STRIX Gaming series motherbards, removing all the orange accents that we've seen on X99 STRIX Gaming products.

Looking at the Z270 line-up from ASUS quite a few things have change compared to the previous generation and one of those things is the “ROG STRIX” series. There is now a complete lineup of STRIX Gaming motherboards and one of those is the ROG STRIX Z270I Gaming, which is a mini-ITX board that features a new design and RGB lighting.

The ROG STRIX Z270I Gaming is an ITX form-factor motherboard. As with all other STRIX Gaming series motherboards this mini-ITX model comes with the AURA feature as well, allowing you to change the illumination of the board from within Windows. In the case of expansion slots there is one full-sized and metal-strengthened PCIe slot and two M.2 slots. Since there is not much space available on mini-ITX motherboards to begin with ASUS created a PCH heatsink that doubles as a cooler for the first M.2 drive. The second drive can be mounted in the slot on the back-side of the PCB. Having a quick look at the SATA connectors we find four of them supporting the SATA-III standard.

Like other ROG STRIX motherboards the heatsinks feature a dark silver paintjob and RGB backlight. Looking for additional features we find USB 3.1 ports internally and externally, a high-quality power design and a good mix of connectors at the I/O panel. There is a Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac module that also supports Bluetooth v4.1. At the moment this is the only Z270 mini-ITX motherboard available from ASUS. So far there aren’t any rumors on a possible Maximus IX Impact, which would have actually been the mini-ITX motherboard we would have expected.

At first glance this is certainly a good looking motherboard and we're more than curious how this little thing performs in our benchmarking parcours.